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96-403: Advanced Video Coding ( AVC ), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 , is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019. It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD . The intent of

192-427: A video codec . Some video coding formats are documented by a detailed technical specification document known as a video coding specification . Some such specifications are written and approved by standardization organizations as technical standards , and are thus known as a video coding standard . There are de facto standards and formal standards. Video content encoded using a particular video coding format

288-531: A H.264 encoder/decoder a codec shortly thereafter ("open-source our H.264 codec"). A video coding format does not dictate all algorithms used by a codec implementing the format. For example, a large part of how video compression typically works is by finding similarities between video frames (block-matching) and then achieving compression by copying previously-coded similar subimages (such as macroblocks ) and adding small differences when necessary. Finding optimal combinations of such predictors and differences

384-461: A H.264/AVC codec that does not support SVC. For temporal bitstream scalability (i.e., the presence of a sub-bitstream with a smaller temporal sampling rate than the main bitstream), complete access units are removed from the bitstream when deriving the sub-bitstream. In this case, high-level syntax and inter-prediction reference pictures in the bitstream are constructed accordingly. On the other hand, for spatial and quality bitstream scalability (i.e.

480-672: A call for patents essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In September 2012, MPEG LA launched Librassay, which makes diagnostic patent rights from some of the world's leading research institutions available to everyone through a single license. Organizations which have included patents in Librassay include Johns Hopkins University ; Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research ; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center ; National Institutes of Health (NIH); Partners HealthCare ; The Board of Trustees of

576-484: A decoding license, US$ 2.50 for an encoding license and US$ 2.50 for encode-decode consumer product license. Since January 1, 2010, MPEG-2 patent pool royalties were US$ 2.00 for a decoding license, US$ 2.00 for an encoding license and US$ 2.00 for encode-decode consumer product. The following organizations hold one or more patents in MPEG LA's H.264/AVC patent pool. The following organizations hold one or more patents in

672-406: A fast DCT algorithm with C.H. Smith and S.C. Fralick in 1977, and founded Compression Labs to commercialize DCT technology. In 1979, Anil K. Jain and Jaswant R. Jain further developed motion-compensated DCT video compression. This led to Chen developing a practical video compression algorithm, called motion-compensated DCT or adaptive scene coding, in 1981. Motion-compensated DCT later became

768-409: A free video format which is thought to be unencumbered by patents, and H.264, which contains patented technology. As late as July 2009, Google and Apple were said to support H.264, while Mozilla and Opera support Ogg Theora (now Google, Mozilla and Opera all support Theora and WebM with VP8 ). Microsoft, with the release of Internet Explorer 9, has added support for HTML 5 video encoded using H.264. At

864-520: A given video coding format from/to uncompressed video are implementations of those specifications. As an analogy, the video coding format H.264 (specification) is to the codec OpenH264 (specific implementation) what the C Programming Language (specification) is to the compiler GCC (specific implementation). Note that for each specification (e.g., H.264 ), there can be many codecs implementing that specification (e.g., x264 , OpenH264, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations ). This distinction

960-416: A lot more computing power than editing intraframe compressed video with the same picture quality. But, this compression is not very effective to use for any audio format. A video coding format can define optional restrictions to encoded video, called profiles and levels. It is possible to have a decoder which only supports decoding a subset of profiles and levels of a given video format, for example to make

1056-556: A much more efficient form of compression for video coding. The CCITT received 14 proposals for DCT-based video compression formats, in contrast to a single proposal based on vector quantization (VQ) compression. The H.261 standard was developed based on motion-compensated DCT compression. H.261 was the first practical video coding standard, and uses patents licensed from a number of companies, including Hitachi , PictureTel , NTT , BT , and Toshiba , among others. Since H.261, motion-compensated DCT compression has been adopted by all

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1152-447: A new patent pool administration company called Via Licensing Alliance . The commercial use of patented H.264 technologies requires the payment of royalties to Via and other patent owners. MPEG LA has allowed the free use of H.264 technologies for streaming Internet video that is free to end users, and Cisco paid royalties to MPEG LA on behalf of the users of binaries for its open source H.264 encoder openH264 . The H.264 name follows

1248-407: A number of companies, primarily Mitsubishi, Hitachi and Panasonic . The most widely used video coding format as of 2019 is H.264/MPEG-4 AVC . It was developed in 2003, and uses patents licensed from a number of organizations, primarily Panasonic, Godo Kaisha IP Bridge and LG Electronics . In contrast to the standard DCT used by its predecessors, AVC uses the integer DCT . H.264 is one of

1344-515: A number of new features that allow it to compress video much more efficiently than older standards and to provide more flexibility for application to a wide variety of network environments. In particular, some such key features include: These techniques, along with several others, help H.264 to perform significantly better than any prior standard under a wide variety of circumstances in a wide variety of application environments. H.264 can often perform radically better than MPEG-2 video—typically obtaining

1440-499: A patent lawsuit due to submarine patents . The motivation behind many recently designed video coding formats such as Theora , VP8 , and VP9 have been to create a ( libre ) video coding standard covered only by royalty-free patents. Patent status has also been a major point of contention for the choice of which video formats the mainstream web browsers will support inside the HTML video tag. The current-generation video coding format

1536-428: A profile code (profile_idc) and sometimes a set of additional constraints applied in the encoder. The profile code and indicated constraints allow a decoder to recognize the requirements for decoding that specific bitstream. (And in many system environments, only one or two profiles are allowed to be used, so decoders in those environments do not need to be concerned with recognizing the less commonly used profiles.) By far

1632-691: A result of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension, the standard contains five additional scalable profiles , which are defined as a combination of a H.264/AVC profile for the base layer (identified by the second word in the scalable profile name) and tools that achieve the scalable extension: As a result of the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) extension, the standard contains two multiview profiles : The Multi-resolution Frame-Compatible (MFC) extension added two more profiles: The 3D-AVC extension added two more profiles: As

1728-443: A very broad application range that covers all forms of digital compressed video from low bit-rate Internet streaming applications to HDTV broadcast and Digital Cinema applications with nearly lossless coding. With the use of H.264, bit rate savings of 50% or more compared to MPEG-2 Part 2 are reported. For example, H.264 has been reported to give the same Digital Satellite TV quality as current MPEG-2 implementations with less than half

1824-454: Is HEVC (H.265), introduced in 2013. AVC uses the integer DCT with 4x4 and 8x8 block sizes, and HEVC uses integer DCT and DST transforms with varied block sizes between 4x4 and 32x32. HEVC is heavily patented, mostly by Samsung Electronics , GE , NTT , and JVCKenwood . It is challenged by the AV1 format, intended for free license. As of 2019 , AVC is by far the most commonly used format for

1920-524: Is not included in the computation of DPB fullness (unless the encoder has indicated for it to be stored for use as a reference for decoding other pictures or for delayed output timing). Thus, a decoder needs to actually have sufficient memory to handle (at least) one frame more than the maximum capacity of the DPB as calculated above. In 2009, the HTML5 working group was split between supporters of Ogg Theora ,

2016-402: Is a content representation format of digital video content, such as in a data file or bitstream . It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation . A specific software, firmware , or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression in a specific video coding format is called

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2112-408: Is a constant value provided in the table below as a function of level number, and PicWidthInMbs and FrameHeightInMbs are the picture width and frame height for the coded video data, expressed in units of macroblocks (rounded up to integer values and accounting for cropping and macroblock pairing when applicable). This formula is specified in sections A.3.1.h and A.3.2.f of the 2017 edition of

2208-412: Is a form of lossless video used in some circumstances such as when sending video to a display over a HDMI connection. Some high-end cameras can also capture video directly in this format. Interframe compression complicates editing of an encoded video sequence. One subclass of relatively simple video coding formats are the intra-frame video formats, such as DV , in which each frame of the video stream

2304-621: Is a former policy director at the Federal Trade Commission , has used the MPEG-2 patent pool as an example of why patent pools need more scrutiny so that they do not suppress innovation. The MPEG-2 patent pool began with 100 patents in 1997 and since then additional patents were added. The MPEG-2 license agreement states that if possible the license fee will not increase when new patents are added. The MPEG-2 license agreement stated that MPEG-2 royalties must be paid when there

2400-409: Is a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC developed by the same organizations, while earlier standards are still in common use. H.264 is perhaps best known as being the most commonly used video encoding format on Blu-ray Discs . It is also widely used by streaming Internet sources, such as videos from Netflix , Hulu , Amazon Prime Video , Vimeo , YouTube , and the iTunes Store , Web software such as

2496-633: Is also referred to as "the JVT codec", in reference to the Joint Video Team (JVT) organization that developed it. (Such partnership and multiple naming is not uncommon. For example, the video compression standard known as MPEG-2 also arose from the partnership between MPEG and the ITU-T, where MPEG-2 video is known to the ITU-T community as H.262.) Some software programs (such as VLC media player ) internally identify this standard as AVC1. In early 1998,

2592-458: Is an NP-hard problem, meaning that it is practically impossible to find an optimal solution. Though the video coding format must support such compression across frames in the bitstream format, by not needlessly mandating specific algorithms for finding such block-matches and other encoding steps, the codecs implementing the video coding specification have some freedom to optimize and innovate in their choice of algorithms. For example, section 0.5 of

2688-414: Is by far the most commonly used format. A specific decoder decodes at least one, but not necessarily all profiles. The standard describes the format of the encoded data and how the data is decoded, but it does not specify algorithms for encoding video – that is left open as a matter for encoder designers to select for themselves, and a wide variety of encoding schemes have been developed. H.264

2784-518: Is compressed independently without referring to other frames in the stream, and no attempt is made to take advantage of correlations between successive pictures over time for better compression. One example is Motion JPEG , which is simply a sequence of individually JPEG -compressed images. This approach is quick and simple, at the expense of the encoded video being much larger than a video coding format supporting Inter frame coding. Because interframe compression copies data from one frame to another, if

2880-610: Is known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4  AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 – MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003, and various extensions of its capabilities have been added in subsequent editions. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), a.k.a. H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2

2976-457: Is normally bundled with an audio stream (encoded using an audio coding format ) inside a multimedia container format such as AVI , MP4 , FLV , RealMedia , or Matroska . As such, the user normally does not have a H.264 file, but instead has a video file , which is an MP4 container of H.264-encoded video, normally alongside AAC -encoded audio. Multimedia container formats can contain one of several different video coding formats; for example,

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3072-442: Is not consistently reflected terminologically in the literature. The H.264 specification calls H.261 , H.262 , H.263 , and H.264 video coding standards and does not contain the word codec . The Alliance for Open Media clearly distinguishes between the AV1 video coding format and the accompanying codec they are developing, but calls the video coding format itself a video codec specification . The VP9 specification calls

3168-580: Is one or more active patents in either the country of manufacture or the country of sale. The original MPEG-2 license rate was US$ 4 for a decoding license, US$ 4 for an encoding license and US$ 6.00 for encode-decode consumer product. A criticism of the MPEG-2 patent pool is that even though the number of patents decreased from 1,048 to 416 by June 2013 the license fee did not decrease with the expiration rate of MPEG-2 patents. For products from January 1, 2002, through December 31, 2009 royalties were US$ 2.50 for

3264-495: Is that, with intraframe systems, each frame uses a similar amount of data. In most interframe systems, certain frames (such as I-frames in MPEG-2 ) are not allowed to copy data from other frames, so they require much more data than other frames nearby. It is possible to build a computer-based video editor that spots problems caused when I frames are edited out while other frames need them. This has allowed newer formats like HDV to be used for editing. However, this process demands

3360-601: Is the highest level supported by that video standard. XAVC can support 4K resolution (4096 × 2160 and 3840 × 2160) at up to 60  frames per second (fps). Sony has announced that cameras that support XAVC include two CineAlta cameras—the Sony PMW-F55 and Sony PMW-F5. The Sony PMW-F55 can record XAVC with 4K resolution at 30 fps at 300 Mbit/s and 2K resolution at 30 fps at 100 Mbit/s. XAVC can record 4K resolution at 60 fps with 4:2:2 chroma sampling at 600 Mbit/s. H.264/AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10 contains

3456-558: Is typically used for lossy compression , although it is also possible to create truly lossless-coded regions within lossy-coded pictures or to support rare use cases for which the entire encoding is lossless. H.264 was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of Study Group 16 together with the ISO/IEC JTC 1 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The project partnership effort

3552-587: The Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight , and also various HDTV broadcasts over terrestrial ( ATSC , ISDB-T , DVB-T or DVB-T2 ), cable ( DVB-C ), and satellite ( DVB-S and DVB-S2 ) systems. H.264 is restricted by patents owned by various parties. A license covering most (but not all) patents essential to H.264 is administered by a patent pool formerly administered by MPEG LA . Via Licensing Corp acquired MPEG LA in April 2023 and formed

3648-608: The Blu-ray Disc format and the now-discontinued HD DVD format include the H.264/AVC High Profile as one of three mandatory video compression formats. The Digital Video Broadcast project ( DVB ) approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in late 2004. The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards body in the United States approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in July 2008, although

3744-545: The ITU-T naming convention , where Recommendations are given a letter corresponding to their series and a recommendation number within the series. H.264 is part of "H-Series Recommendations: Audiovisual and multimedia systems". H.264 is further categorized into "H.200-H.499: Infrastructure of audiovisual services" and "H.260-H.279: Coding of moving video". The MPEG-4 AVC name relates to the naming convention in ISO / IEC MPEG , where

3840-595: The MPEG-2 standard, a working group of companies that participated in the formation of the MPEG-2 standard recognized that the biggest challenge to adoption was efficient access to essential patents owned by many patent owners. That ultimately led to a group of various MPEG-2 patent owners to form MPEG LA, which in turn created the first modern-day patent pool as a solution. The majority of patents underlying MPEG-2 technology were owned by three companies: Sony (311 patents), Thomson (198 patents) and Mitsubishi Electric (119 patents). In June 2012, MPEG LA announced

3936-622: The Moving Picture Experts Group . The above-mentioned aspects include features in all profiles of H.264. A profile for a codec is a set of features of that codec identified to meet a certain set of specifications of intended applications. This means that many of the features listed are not supported in some profiles. Various profiles of H.264/AVC are discussed in next section. The standard defines several sets of capabilities, which are referred to as profiles , targeting specific classes of applications. These are declared using

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4032-544: The Simplified BSD license , and pay all royalties for its use to MPEG LA for any software projects that use Cisco's precompiled binaries, thus making Cisco's OpenH264 binaries free to use. However, any software projects that use Cisco's source code instead of its binaries would be legally responsible for paying all royalties to MPEG LA. Target CPU architectures include x86 and ARM, and target operating systems include Linux, Windows XP and later, Mac OS X, and Android; iOS

4128-541: The Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG – ITU-T SG16 Q.6) issued a call for proposals on a project called H.26L, with the target to double the coding efficiency (which means halving the bit rate necessary for a given level of fidelity) in comparison to any other existing video coding standards for a broad variety of applications. VCEG was chaired by Gary Sullivan ( Microsoft , formerly PictureTel , U.S.). The first draft design for that new standard

4224-437: The main and high profiles but not in baseline . A level is a restriction on parameters such as maximum resolution and data rates. MPEG LA Via Licensing Corp acquired MPEG LA in April 2023 and formed a new patent pool administration company called Via Licensing Alliance . MPEG LA started operations in July 1997 immediately after receiving a Department of Justice Business Review Letter. During formation of

4320-461: The temporal dimension . DCT coding is a lossy block compression transform coding technique that was first proposed by Nasir Ahmed , who initially intended it for image compression , while he was working at Kansas State University in 1972. It was then developed into a practical image compression algorithm by Ahmed with T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at the University of Texas in 1973, and

4416-438: The temporal dimension . In 1967, University of London researchers A.H. Robinson and C. Cherry proposed run-length encoding (RLE), a lossless compression scheme, to reduce the transmission bandwidth of analog television signals. The earliest digital video coding algorithms were either for uncompressed video or used lossless compression , both methods inefficient and impractical for digital video coding. Digital video

4512-478: The DCT and the fast Fourier transform (FFT), developing inter-frame hybrid coders for them, and found that the DCT is the most efficient due to its reduced complexity, capable of compressing image data down to 0.25- bit per pixel for a videotelephone scene with image quality comparable to a typical intra-frame coder requiring 2-bit per pixel. The DCT was applied to video encoding by Wen-Hsiung Chen, who developed

4608-874: The FRExt project, such as adding an 8×8 integer discrete cosine transform (integer DCT) with adaptive switching between the 4×4 and 8×8 transforms, encoder-specified perceptual-based quantization weighting matrices, efficient inter-picture lossless coding, and support of additional color spaces. The design work on the FRExt project was completed in July 2004, and the drafting work on them was completed in September 2004. Five other new profiles (see version 7 below) intended primarily for professional applications were then developed, adding extended-gamut color space support, defining additional aspect ratio indicators, defining two additional types of "supplemental enhancement information" (post-filter hint and tone mapping), and deprecating one of

4704-592: The Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt) project was finalized. From January 2005 to November 2007, the JVT was working on an extension of H.264/AVC towards scalability by an Annex (G) called Scalable Video Coding (SVC). The JVT management team was extended by Jens-Rainer Ohm ( RWTH Aachen University , Germany). From July 2006 to November 2009, the JVT worked on Multiview Video Coding (MVC), an extension of H.264/AVC towards 3D television and limited-range free-viewpoint television . That work included

4800-720: The Gartner Symposium/ITXpo in November 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer answered the question "HTML 5 or Silverlight ?" by saying "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question the world is going HTML5." In January 2011, Google announced that they were pulling support for H.264 from their Chrome browser and supporting both Theora and WebM / VP8 to use only open formats. On March 18, 2012, Mozilla announced support for H.264 in Firefox on mobile devices, due to prevalence of H.264-encoded video and

4896-538: The H.264 specification says that encoding algorithms are not part of the specification. Free choice of algorithm also allows different space–time complexity trade-offs for the same video coding format, so a live feed can use a fast but space-inefficient algorithm, and a one-time DVD encoding for later mass production can trade long encoding-time for space-efficient encoding. The concept of analog video compression dates back to 1929, when R.D. Kell in Britain proposed

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4992-552: The H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (i.e., half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2 , H.263 , or MPEG-4 Part 2 ), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. This was achieved with features such as a reduced-complexity integer discrete cosine transform (integer DCT), variable block-size segmentation, and multi-picture inter-picture prediction . An additional goal

5088-533: The H.264/AVC standard include the following completed revisions, corrigenda, and amendments (dates are final approval dates in ITU-T, while final "International Standard" approval dates in ISO/IEC are somewhat different and slightly later in most cases). Each version represents changes relative to the next lower version that is integrated into the text. The following organizations hold one or more patents in MPEG LA's H.264/AVC patent pool. The H.264 video format has

5184-598: The High Profile is 1.25 times that of the Constrained Baseline, Baseline, Extended and Main Profiles; 3 times for Hi10P, and 4 times for Hi422P/Hi444PP. The number of luma samples is 16×16=256 times the number of macroblocks (and the number of luma samples per second is 256 times the number of macroblocks per second). Previously encoded pictures are used by H.264/AVC encoders to provide predictions of

5280-667: The Leland Stanford Junior University; The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania; The University of California, San Francisco ; and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). On September 29, 2014, the MPEG LA announced their HEVC license which covers the patents from 23 companies. The license is US$ 0.20 per HEVC product after the first 100,000 units each year with an annual cap. The license has been expanded to include

5376-511: The MP4 container format can contain video coding formats such as MPEG-2 Part 2 or H.264. Another example is the initial specification for the file type WebM , which specifies the container format (Matroska), but also exactly which video ( VP8 ) and audio ( Vorbis ) compression format is inside the Matroska container, even though Matroska is capable of containing VP9 video, and Opus audio support

5472-520: The VP8 video format. In May 2010, Nero AG filed an antitrust suit against MPEG LA, claiming it "unlawfully extended its patent pools by adding non-essential patents to the MPEG-2 patent pool" and has been inconsistent in charging royalty fees. The United States District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the suit with prejudice on November 29, 2010. David Balto, who

5568-422: The bandwidth available in the 2000s. Practical video compression emerged with the development of motion-compensated DCT (MC DCT) coding, also called block motion compensation (BMC) or DCT motion compensation. This is a hybrid coding algorithm, which combines two key data compression techniques: discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding in the spatial dimension , and predictive motion compensation in

5664-518: The bitrate, with current MPEG-2 implementations working at around 3.5 Mbit/s and H.264 at only 1.5 Mbit/s. Sony claims that 9 Mbit/s AVC recording mode is equivalent to the image quality of the HDV format, which uses approximately 18–25 Mbit/s. To ensure compatibility and problem-free adoption of H.264/AVC, many standards bodies have amended or added to their video-related standards so that users of these standards can employ H.264/AVC. Both

5760-535: The complete encoding or decoding process, or for acceleration assistance within a CPU-controlled environment. CPU based solutions are known to be much more flexible, particularly when encoding must be done concurrently in multiple formats, multiple bit rates and resolutions ( multi-screen video ), and possibly with additional features on container format support, advanced integrated advertising features, etc. CPU based software solution generally makes it much easier to load balance multiple concurrent encoding sessions within

5856-477: The concept of transmitting only the portions of the scene that changed from frame-to-frame. The concept of digital video compression dates back to 1952, when Bell Labs researchers B.M. Oliver and C.W. Harrison proposed the use of differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM) in video coding. In 1959, the concept of inter-frame motion compensation was proposed by NHK researchers Y. Taki, M. Hatori and S. Tanaka, who proposed predictive inter-frame video coding in

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5952-487: The core decoding process, but can indicate how the video is recommended to be post-processed or displayed. Some other high-level properties of the video content are conveyed in video usability information (VUI), such as the indication of the color space for interpretation of the video content. As new color spaces have been developed, such as for high dynamic range and wide color gamut video, additional VUI identifiers have been added to indicate them. The standardization of

6048-414: The decoder program/hardware smaller, simpler, or faster. A profile restricts which encoding techniques are allowed. For example, the H.264 format includes the profiles baseline , main and high (and others). While P-slices (which can be predicted based on preceding slices) are supported in all profiles, B-slices (which can be predicted based on both preceding and following slices) are supported in

6144-681: The development of two new profiles of the standard: the Multiview High Profile and the Stereo High Profile. Throughout the development of the standard, additional messages for containing supplemental enhancement information (SEI) have been developed. SEI messages can contain various types of data that indicate the timing of the video pictures or describe various properties of the coded video or how it can be used or enhanced. SEI messages are also defined that can contain arbitrary user-defined data. SEI messages do not affect

6240-477: The first version of H.264/AVC was completed in May 2003. In the first project to extend the original standard, the JVT then developed what was called the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt). These extensions enabled higher quality video coding by supporting increased sample bit depth precision and higher-resolution color information, including the sampling structures known as Y′C B C R 4:2:2 (a.k.a. YUV 4:2:2 ) and 4:4:4. Several other features were also included in

6336-519: The increased power-efficiency of using dedicated H.264 decoder hardware common on such devices. On February 20, 2013, Mozilla implemented support in Firefox for decoding H.264 on Windows 7 and above. This feature relies on Windows' built in decoding libraries. Firefox 35.0, released on January 13, 2015, supports H.264 on OS X 10.6 and higher. On October 30, 2013, Rowan Trollope from Cisco Systems announced that Cisco would release both binaries and source code of an H.264 video codec called OpenH264 under

6432-495: The latest quad-core general-purpose x86 CPUs have sufficient computation power to perform real-time SD and HD encoding. Compression efficiency depends on video algorithmic implementations, not on whether hardware or software implementation is used. Therefore, the difference between hardware and software based implementation is more on power-efficiency, flexibility and cost. To improve the power efficiency and reduce hardware form-factor, special-purpose hardware may be employed, either for

6528-419: The major video coding standards (including the H.26x and MPEG formats) that followed. MPEG-1 , developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), followed in 1991, and it was designed to compress VHS -quality video. It was succeeded in 1994 by MPEG-2 / H.262 , which was developed with patents licensed from a number of companies, primarily Sony , Thomson and Mitsubishi Electric . MPEG-2 became

6624-405: The most commonly used profile is the High Profile. Profiles for non-scalable 2D video applications include the following: For camcorders, editing, and professional applications, the standard contains four additional Intra-frame -only profiles, which are defined as simple subsets of other corresponding profiles. These are mostly for professional (e.g., camera and editing system) applications: As

6720-399: The native recording format. AVCHD is a high-definition recording format designed by Sony and Panasonic that uses H.264 (conforming to H.264 while adding additional application-specific features and constraints). AVC-Intra is an intraframe -only compression format, developed by Panasonic . XAVC is a recording format designed by Sony that uses level 5.2 of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which

6816-419: The new company. MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn will serve as a Via LA advisor. MPEG LA has claimed that video codecs such as Theora and VP8 infringe on patents owned by its licensors, without disclosing the affected patent or patents. They then called out for “any party that believes it has patents that are essential to the VP8 video codec”. In April 2013, Google and MPEG LA announced an agreement covering

6912-457: The original frame is simply cut out (or lost in transmission), the following frames cannot be reconstructed properly. Making cuts in intraframe-compressed video while video editing is almost as easy as editing uncompressed video: one finds the beginning and ending of each frame, and simply copies bit-for-bit each frame that one wants to keep, and discards the frames one does not want. Another difference between intraframe and interframe compression

7008-560: The presence of a sub-bitstream with lower spatial resolution/quality than the main bitstream), the NAL ( Network Abstraction Layer ) is removed from the bitstream when deriving the sub-bitstream. In this case, inter-layer prediction (i.e., the prediction of the higher spatial resolution/quality signal from the data of the lower spatial resolution/quality signal) is typically used for efficient coding. The Scalable Video Coding extensions were completed in November 2007. The next major feature added to

7104-536: The prior FRExt profiles (the High 4:4:4 profile) that industry feedback indicated should have been designed differently. The next major feature added to the standard was Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Specified in Annex G of H.264/AVC, SVC allows the construction of bitstreams that contain layers of sub-bitstreams that also conform to the standard, including one such bitstream known as the "base layer" that can be decoded by

7200-488: The profiles in version 2 of the HEVC standard. On March 5, 2015, the MPEG LA announced their DisplayPort license which is US$ 0.20 per DisplayPort product. In April 2023, in what is thought to be the first time that two pool administrators have merged into one, Via Licensing Corp acquired MPEG LA and formed a new patent pool administrator called Via Licensing Alliance . Via President Heath Hoglund will serve as president of

7296-514: The recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video developers, followed by HEVC which is used by 43% of developers. Consumer video is generally compressed using lossy video codecs , since that results in significantly smaller files than lossless compression. Some video coding formats designed explicitly for either lossy or lossless compression, and some video coding formats such as Dirac and H.264 support both. Uncompressed video formats, such as Clean HDMI ,

7392-454: The same CPU. The 2nd generation Intel " Sandy Bridge " Core i3/i5/i7 processors introduced at the January 2011 CES ( Consumer Electronics Show ) offer an on-chip hardware full HD H.264 encoder, known as Intel Quick Sync Video . A hardware H.264 encoder can be an ASIC or an FPGA . Video compression standard A video coding format (or sometimes video compression format )

7488-408: The same quality at half of the bit rate or less, especially on high bit rate and high resolution video content. Like other ISO/IEC MPEG video standards, H.264/AVC has a reference software implementation that can be freely downloaded. Its main purpose is to give examples of H.264/AVC features, rather than being a useful application per se . Some reference hardware design work has also been conducted in

7584-532: The standard coding technique for video compression from the late 1980s onwards. The first digital video coding standard was H.120 , developed by the CCITT (now ITU-T) in 1984. H.120 was not usable in practice, as its performance was too poor. H.120 used motion-compensated DPCM coding, a lossless compression algorithm that was inefficient for video coding. During the late 1980s, a number of companies began experimenting with discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding,

7680-516: The standard is not yet used for fixed ATSC broadcasts within the United States. It has also been approved for use with the more recent ATSC-M/H (Mobile/Handheld) standard, using the AVC and SVC portions of H.264. The closed-circuit-television and video-surveillance markets have included the technology in many products. Many common DSLRs use H.264 video wrapped in QuickTime MOV containers as

7776-410: The standard is part 10 of ISO/IEC 14496, which is the suite of standards known as MPEG-4. The standard was developed jointly in a partnership of VCEG and MPEG, after earlier development work in the ITU-T as a VCEG project called H.26L. It is thus common to refer to the standard with names such as H.264/AVC, AVC/H.264, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, or MPEG-4/H.264 AVC, to emphasize the common heritage. Occasionally, it

7872-434: The standard video format for DVD and SD digital television . Its motion-compensated DCT algorithm was able to achieve a compression ratio of up to 100:1, enabling the development of digital media technologies such as video on demand (VOD) and high-definition television (HDTV). In 1999, it was followed by MPEG-4 / H.263 , which was a major leap forward for video compression technology. It uses patents licensed from

7968-874: The standard was Multiview Video Coding (MVC). Specified in Annex H of H.264/AVC, MVC enables the construction of bitstreams that represent more than one view of a video scene. An important example of this functionality is stereoscopic 3D video coding. Two profiles were developed in the MVC work: Multiview High profile supports an arbitrary number of views, and Stereo High profile is designed specifically for two-view stereoscopic video. The Multiview Video Coding extensions were completed in November 2009. Additional extensions were later developed that included 3D video coding with joint coding of depth maps and texture (termed 3D-AVC), multi-resolution frame-compatible (MFC) stereoscopic and 3D-MFC coding, various additional combinations of features, and higher frame sizes and frame rates. Versions of

8064-432: The standard. For example, for an HDTV picture that is 1,920 samples wide ( PicWidthInMbs = 120 ) and 1,080 samples high ( FrameHeightInMbs = 68 ), a Level 4 decoder has a maximum DPB storage capacity of floor(32768/(120*68)) = 4 frames (or 8 fields). Thus, the value 4 is shown in parentheses in the table above in the right column of the row for Level 4 with the frame size 1920×1080. The current picture being decoded

8160-440: The term is used in the standard, a " level " is a specified set of constraints that indicate a degree of required decoder performance for a profile. For example, a level of support within a profile specifies the maximum picture resolution, frame rate, and bit rate that a decoder may use. A decoder that conforms to a given level must be able to decode all bitstreams encoded for that level and all lower levels. The maximum bit rate for

8256-409: The values of samples in other pictures. This allows the encoder to make efficient decisions on the best way to encode a given picture. At the decoder, such pictures are stored in a virtual decoded picture buffer (DPB). The maximum capacity of the DPB, in units of frames (or pairs of fields), as shown in parentheses in the right column of the table above, can be computed as follows: Where MaxDpbMbs

8352-475: The video coding format VP9 itself a codec . As an example of conflation, Chromium's and Mozilla's pages listing their video formats support both call video coding formats, such as H.264 codecs . As another example, in Cisco's announcement of a free-as-in-beer video codec, the press release refers to the H.264 video coding format as a codec ("choice of a common video codec"), but calls Cisco's implementation of

8448-572: The video encoding standards for Blu-ray Discs ; all Blu-ray Disc players must be able to decode H.264. It is also widely used by streaming internet sources, such as videos from YouTube , Netflix , Vimeo , and the iTunes Store , web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight , and also various HDTV broadcasts over terrestrial ( ATSC standards , ISDB-T , DVB-T or DVB-T2 ), cable ( DVB-C ), and satellite ( DVB-S2 ). A main problem for many video coding formats has been patents , making it expensive to use or potentially risking

8544-687: Was adopted in August 1999. In 2000, Thomas Wiegand ( Heinrich Hertz Institute , Germany) became VCEG co-chair. In December 2001, VCEG and the Moving Picture Experts Group ( MPEG  – ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 /WG 11) formed a Joint Video Team (JVT), with the charter to finalize the video coding standard. Formal approval of the specification came in March 2003. The JVT was (is) chaired by Gary Sullivan , Thomas Wiegand , and Ajay Luthra ( Motorola , U.S.: later Arris , U.S.). In July 2004,

8640-432: Was initially limited to intra-frame coding in the spatial dimension. In 1975, John A. Roese and Guner S. Robinson extended Habibi's hybrid coding algorithm to the temporal dimension, using transform coding in the spatial dimension and predictive coding in the temporal dimension, developing inter-frame motion-compensated hybrid coding. For the spatial transform coding, they experimented with different transforms, including

8736-446: Was introduced in the 1970s, initially using uncompressed pulse-code modulation (PCM), requiring high bitrates around 45–200 Mbit/s for standard-definition (SD) video, which was up to 2,000 times greater than the telecommunication bandwidth (up to 100   kbit/s ) available until the 1990s. Similarly, uncompressed high-definition (HD) 1080p video requires bitrates exceeding 1   Gbit/s , significantly greater than

8832-460: Was later added to the WebM specification. A format is the layout plan for data produced or consumed by a codec . Although video coding formats such as H.264 are sometimes referred to as codecs , there is a clear conceptual difference between a specification and its implementations. Video coding formats are described in specifications, and software, firmware , or hardware to encode/decode data in

8928-441: Was not supported by the 2013 Cisco software release, Apple updated its Video Toolbox Framework with iOS 8 (released in September 2014) to provide direct access to hardware-based H.264/AVC video encoding and decoding. Because H.264 encoding and decoding requires significant computing power in specific types of arithmetic operations, software implementations that run on general-purpose CPUs are typically less power efficient. However,

9024-467: Was notably absent from this list, because it doesn't allow applications to fetch and install binary modules from the Internet. Also on October 30, 2013, Brendan Eich from Mozilla wrote that it would use Cisco's binaries in future versions of Firefox to add support for H.264 to Firefox where platform codecs are not available. Cisco published the source code to OpenH264 on December 9, 2013. Although iOS

9120-426: Was published in 1974. The other key development was motion-compensated hybrid coding. In 1974, Ali Habibi at the University of Southern California introduced hybrid coding, which combines predictive coding with transform coding. He examined several transform coding techniques, including the DCT, Hadamard transform , Fourier transform , slant transform, and Karhunen-Loeve transform . However, his algorithm

9216-443: Was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast , DVD storage, RTP / IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems. The H.264 standard can be viewed as a "family of standards" composed of a number of different profiles, although its "High profile"

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